Then this statement is false:
Alimony laws could not transfer straight over to SSM? Why on earth not? And give me some of these child related laws that cannot transfer over?
In the same way anti-miscegination laws did not discriminate (or need not, as some of them I think specifically did discriminate, though not all). Laws criminalizing homosexual sex don’t discriminate, because a gay person was perfectly free to have heterosexual sex.
It’s frankly an idiotic definition of discrimination. And the comparison with drug addiction doesn’t hold water. The government needs a reason to treat people differently. Sometimes this barrier isn’t very high. The government has at least a rational basis for laws that discriminate against drug users. You have compeletely failed to provide any basis for a law discriminating against homosexuals, other than some vague, ephemeral “my marriage won’t be as special after.” And my guess is that such a reason, under Kennedy’s analysis in Romer, is nothing but animus towards homosexuals, and as such “lacks a rational relationship to legitimate state interests.”
It’s not to me, i was just responding to those who think marriage is somehow an enforcement of what is 'natural". It is not.
No. Why don’t you give me the text of a law that can’t map over to deal with SSM and explain to me why it cannot. You can’t sit there and say “deal with this problem” when you have failed to demonstrate that a problem exists.
I’m starting to think the RAAAcist card is all you’ve got. As has been pointed out by me and others in this thread there is absolutely no relationship between creating a law that RESTRICTS marriage between two opposite sex people and creating a law that ALLOWS certain groups to marry or REDEFINES the word marriage.
Have you bothered to read my posts? Gays have every right to marry. But, just like me, they cannot marry someone of the same sex.
Isn’t part of the problem, Bricker, that we simply don’t know what rational basis review means when it comes to homosexuals as a class. Courts haven’t been willing to move away from rational basis review, but Romer doesn’t seem to fit into the pattern of traditional rational basis analysis. Maybe there is a new review level - “rational basis with teeth.” But no one has defined this yet.
Come on now. Straights can marry the persons they love. Gays cannot. How is that the same right?
It is exactly the same.
You are exactly as wrong as a person who thinks that allowing a black and white to marry would sully the institution of marriage. You are that person. That you have chosen a different group is hardly germane.
It’s a wretched stance and you’re clumsily trying to come up with a logical rationale for it, but failing loudly and profoundly.
How about if we call it marriage (because that’s what it would be) but you can just pretend it’s spelled “Mariage” with one R.
Problem solved. Your precious word will be safe from the Attack of the Gays.
No. Straights have the right to marry someone they are sexually attracted to. Gays do not have that right.
If you can’t form a real logical argument for something, that might mean that you’re holding a silly opinion. Just sayin’.
I stopped reading about the middle of page 3 so this may have been covered already. But if not, for anyone who is still reading, I am always surprised when a list of countries which have SSM is given and it doesn’t include Britain. Then I remember, we don’t have SSM. We have civil unions.
I work occassional with legal documents which mention marriage and the drafting now always includes ‘or civil unions’.
Out in the real world, it took about three days for people in normal conversation or writing to automatically describe civil unions as marriages, and people in civil unions as married. Something to think about, if you are gay and holding out for SSM instead of civil unions, or if you think that offering civil unions will preserve the sacred dignity of marriage.
Sorta. It’s true that Romer has been called “rational basis with teeth.” But I’m not so sure that Romer doesn’t fit into extant rational basis analyses.
Because Romer was a single enactment that affected a “wide range of public and private transactions” and imposed a “broad disability upon those persons alone,” it was impossible for the court to conceive of a governmental interest that was served by the legislation. The narrower in scope and effect the legislation, the more likely it is that a reviewing court can conceive of some rational basis for the law.
:rolleyes:
Ad hominem. This is GD.
It’s been a while since I looked at it, but I don’t remember rational basis review being used to strike anything else down. And Colorado did give reasons for the amendment; the majority, led by Kennedy, chose to find these reasons specious. And they were, but that’s a value judgment.
Traditional rational basis review doesn’t look if the reason is pretence or not, just if there is a reason. And that isn’t what they seemed to do in Romer.
Is it? I guess wretched stance is on the attacky side.
Honest question, can I say that hypotheticalposter03 has a terrible or wretched position in regard to an issue? I didn’t see that as over the line, but I’ll rein it back if that’s the case. I guess I’ll amend my previous post to say that the stance is wrong?
Not exactly the right statement of rational basis review. There has to be a reason, and the reason has to be rationally related to the legitimate government interest. The reason doesn’t have to be one that is proferred by the legislature; it may be imagined by the reviewing court – but it has to exist AND be rationally related to a legitimate end goal.
In Romer, it wasn’t. Nor is that the only time that’s happened. In City of Cleburne v. Cleburne Living Center, the Court struck down a special zoning permit “for the feebleminded” that Cleburne was requiring for a home for the mentally challenged. They did not classify the mentally challenged as a suspect class; they merely noted that no reason advanced by the city or imagined by the reviewing courts was rationally related to any legitimate goal of the city’s.
That’s true - I was speaking more in short hand as to what courts have done. And they did look a lot harder in Romer than they traditionally have.
I knew there was an earlier case, and I cannot believe I forgot City of Cleburne. I don’t think there have been any others. This is obviously a tangent and I’ll drop it, but EP analysis pisses me off intensely.
False.
Marriage was trecognized as the union of a man and a woman, (or, in different cultures, a man and more than one woman and in a couple of rare cultures, a woman and more than one man*), but race had no part of the definition at any time. Even when anti-miscegenation laws were in effect, they were only enacted in a limited number of states and the laws did not make mixed race marriages non-existent, only improper under the law. A mixed race couple were still considered married, but their action was improper, unlike bigamy, for example, where the second marriage was considered to have never taken place.
The comparison of anti-miscegenation laws to laws defining marriage as between persons of the opposite sex has a limited value as a talking point regarding civil rights, but it is fails to identify two equal situations because the word marriage has never meant the union of two persons of the same sex until a few decades ago and it is still not fully recognized as such across either the U.S. or the English speaking world.
I have already argued that under pressure from scientific advances leading to shifts in culture, the word marriage has already begun to shift away from a definition of only opposite sex unions intended to protect procreation, and I absolutely do support SSM as a right, but arguing that it is merely a matter of recognizing existing civil rights or that opposition to it is identical in nature to support of anti-miscegenation laws is not correct.
The language is changing, but SSM still requires a change either in law or in wider acceptance of the newly emerging definition before there is any constitutional impetus to recognize SSM under existing law.
= = =
- In all these discussions, only a single incidence has been reported of any culture that recognizes something similar to same sex marriage and that is among a group following partrlineal descent that allows a woman to stand in as a deceased husband to prevent more distant kin from claiming property after the original husband’s death. It looks nothing like anything under discussion as marriage in these debates.
You’re quite simply wrong.
In 60s America you weren’t married if you were in the south and of a different race. You are missing the obvious here.
I’m no historian, but you appear, at least to my limited understanding of history to be utterly wrong: Anti-miscegenation laws - Wikipedia
Again, the meaning has shifted tremendously since antiquity and before. Holding on defiantly to the recent definition is simply silly.
I am not arguing for the current law to recognize SSM. I am arguing that there is no justifiable, logical reason to not allow SSM. I understand that this may involve changing current laws, if only the addendum of a line of text here and there.
Honestly, who the hell cares? Until women could vote they had never been able to either (I’m sure the first incidence of a woman voting was in antiquity, but I assume you take my meaning). Are you suggesting that women didn’t deserve the right to vote until they had it?